If I remember correctly, that's already done in USB; you dont have a guarantee of more than 100mA, but you can request it to step up to 500mA (so you can run a 4 port hub off one USB contact without extra power).
Even so, devices like disks could theoretically store power in a battery or capacitors to satisfy their short-term spikes, but as we dont see that happening I suspect it's an actual power constraint, rather than a design mistake.
12W@12V would be 1 Amp, so you'd only need a marginally thicker cable(or two)
Multiply it by 4 for sata and 4-8 for USB, and you would, however, have a noticably thicker motherboard (and/or separate PSU connectors and caps beside the USB and SATA connectors).
It's most likely not the cable that's the problem but the actual electronics that have to support the rated draw of the cable. Or worse, imagine having motherboards that dont support the rated draw and having users calling tech support with 'my computer crashed as I inserted my USB cupwarmer and the keyboard with LCD display and cooling fan at once!!!'.
You'd end up having to have a calculator to figure out what devices you could actually attach to your computer at any one time. Much as I'm loath to say it, I prefer the wallwarts over that.
I can easily think of actual technical issues on this one.
See, historically, disks have had their power supported by the PSU directly. Now you want to replace IDE and put SATA connectors on the motherboard. That's fine. Then you want the SATA connectors to supply power enough to drive one disk? Ok... Then you want the SATA connectors to supply enough power to drive four disks? That's an 80W or more power bus over the motherboard; motherboard manufacturers had just about gotten over having to add new power connectors for CPU's and partly for PCIe, and now you want them to take the hit for disk power too, and presumably do some engineering for it too, (such as stabilizing the power so your computer doesn't crash as parts of the MB loses power when the disk spins up)?
Call it political or call it technical, but in this case it was probably not just simply adding the connectors that was the problem (you could have gotten around the issue by placing a PSU connector next to any SATA contact, of course, but imagine the bitching about that).
Maybe they only spot those sorts of things with the "Evil bit" set??
Close enough. Reading an article by a security guy a few years ago they're only tested on specific known test items, and are thus heavily trained (by their cheap contractor/employer) to spot only those specific items.
So it's not the Evil bit, it's the TSA spot-check test bit. They dont get fired for not spotting something that could be a weapon, they get fired (and their employer fined) for not spotting the TSA test-weapon.
"But you'll continue buying it, because the awesome download speed will trump all other concerns..."
Heh, really tho. I dont think I've _ever_ bought an internet connection for speed. Every single time has been for price (and/or not-screwing-with-my-connection-policies). In the last five years I havent initiated a single change, yet I've had my speed upgraded three times.
With cable companies and DSL providers upgrading consumers just because they can it's no wonder they're whining about having to pay for network upgrades.
How about, you know, not upgrading customers and assigning them the actual bandwidth they have, rather than upgrading the hardware then cutting it down to modem speeds.
Yep, I'm just having trouble imagining exactly what that niche market is; for that price you can obtain vastly superior performance simply by dumping the money into RAM and disk spindles instead.
You'd have to have some very artificial constraints and a very odd load to actually find a situation where the money would be well spent (as in large mis-programmed database running on a 32bit-only machine that cant have more than 1 sata controller).
pumping water, flywheels, and methods like that work quite well.
Oh, I agree that pumped water storage and such are superior but that's on a grid-level. It doesn't solve the portability or (to some extent) transmission/offline use issues. You're not going to have them in a car or in a cabin in the mountains, or running hospital backup generators. (And on the grid-level I expect the lazy/desperate alternative will resolve that question: nuke plants.)
But while hydrocarbons stink as an energy storage medium, that's mostly a comment on the sad state of the alternative replacements as few of them are near a cost-effective/useful state yet (to the sad extent that geeks get all wild and drooling when hearing about the possibility of hydrocarbon powered fuel-cell laptops...).
"Wouldn't it make more sense to make electricity directly from the solar energy and not involve the coal at all?"
To some extent, yes. The main problem is that electricity produced needs to be (almost) instantly consumed. Chemical storage of the energy avoids that problem. As such, there are various forms of chemical energy storage, ranging from batteries, through hydrogen, through ammonia to hydrocarbons, all with their own problems and advantages.
With batteries, the main trouble is they store too little and they (comparatively) rapidly break down.
Fuel cells can run on hydrogen or ammonia, with varying success. Hydrogen is a PITA to store, but perhaps ammonia is a simpler compromise.
Or hydrocarbons. Which have the advantage of being easy to store and fairly stable.
The thing about the energy crisis is there is no lack of energy (in fact, global warming is in essense an excess of it, and provides excesses of it in the form of weather). There's just a huge problem of extracting, transporting and, above all, storing that energy so you can use it when and where you need it.
Yep, that's the ones the OLPC project is aimed at. IIRC, part of the idea was to replace cost of educational material, so paying for the OLPC would basically be cheaper than buying books for the students (over a period of several years).
Maybe in favour of Intel? A more accurate headline, but one that could be construed as inflammatory would be:
Intel attempts to subvert efforts to get computers to children.
"the Intel machines it's trying to sell will still go to the same target audience as the OLPC units"
For about twice the price. Which means half the number of units.
"it's not like they suddenly hate kids!"
Well, no. They just dont like kids quite as much as they like money.
I don't particularly dislike Intel, but in this case I must say I find their behaviour offensive. This will go on their permanent record and get weighed in for future purchases.
"I'd love to see other devices like the EEE PC tailored towards developing nations in the near future."
In the long run, paving the ground for this device class is without a doubt the greatest contribution of the OLPC project.
"Seriously, that test, if it ever existed, is utter crap."
I linked it in another reply, but it's in swedish, so.
"one may not notice the difference easily if you don't have a side-by-side comparison."
See, that's the point. When you're actually watching a movie you most likely wont have a side-by-side comparison (and they didn't in the test in question), nor will you be concentrating on stubble.
If most people _think_ it's HD even when it's not, when presented out of the blue with a SD stream on a good enough display, should we waste OTA carrier space for HD broadcasts, crowding out alternatives like more channels or data traffic? Should one pay more for DRM crippled blue-ray?
"If you really don't see the difference, then I suggest you get your vision fixed."
Oh, I see the difference, under the right circumstances. I've tested myself back and forth on computer monitors with test patterns and with test files. Mainly while I was trying to determine at what resolution and bitrate to rip my own DVD's (and the resolution/bitrate/storage volume compromise ended up even below SD resolution, as blockiness was noticable and disturbing while resolution didnt affect the experience much and a full quality rip made so little difference itsimply wasnt worth the extra space).
The interesting question isnt wether it's possible to notice the difference, the interesting question is wether you will.
Unfortunately it's in swedish, but here's one http://www.m3.idg.se/2.1022/1.132631 (there's a link to a video and some stuff too). The test was initially mainly intended to assess plasma versus lcd, but that ended up not being nearly as interesting as the failure to reliably distinguish resolutions.
"I manage to pick 1080p/720p over 480p"
If you switch back and forth a few times it's certainly possible, but many need to use visual cues (like you mention, stubble) to do it. I assume you're not normally specifically watching stubble movies, or switching back and forth. What was noticable here was the initial reaction; going from nothing to movie, nobody thought it was SD. And that's pretty close to how you usually operate a TV.
"but 50" / 2m?"
Yes, some had difficulty. Not all eyes are created equal, even assuming they had whatever corrective lenses they'd require.
I'm not saying HD is useless. I'm saying dont pay too much extra, and prioritize other features like color and contrast (or the ability to rip and store content), because under normal viewing circumstances, watching a movie, most people wont actually notice, and some cant even notice the difference.
But that's for film. For still pictures HD resolution is a step forward. For anyone using their TV as a screen it's also a huge step forward. For anyone like me, wanting large computer screens, it's great that they're getting popular.
Still, I hate people getting jerked around by salesmen (and even more by media companies wanting to charge more and jam DRM down their throats in exchange for a difference in quality they cant even see), so I feel compelled to point this out.
And even more telling than what I've been able to find to support that point of view (this latest blindtest, some more I cant recall where they were, some articles on the capacity of the human eye) is the huge amount of material I'm not finding to disprove it.
"Most people that have a good HDTV can tell a large difference in good HD content."
You mean, some people _think_ they can tell the difference (notably TV salesmen and people who've bought a HDTV).
I read a recent blindtest where three experts and a bunch of non-experts were tested for the difference between HD and non HD material on several LCD's and plasma displays.
On the first test, 42 inch screen, 3.5 meters away (10 ft), they all guessed 720p. It was 480p. After much flipping back and forth, some managed to get it right. More tests and eventually getting down to 50" 2 meters (6 ft) away, and there were still some who couldnt even tell 480p from 1080p. Nobody could tell 720p from 1080p better than random chance.
The fact is, such tests show that under normal viewing conditions most people simply dont have eyes and visual centers good enough to reliably notice the difference between SD and HD, nevermind deciding what looks best. You have to get up to 60-100 inch screens at a normal viewing distance to be able to reliably tell the difference; most people would be much better off getting a TV with better color and contrast ratio and simply slap a HD sticker on it so they think it's buzzword compliant.
To make a car analogy, that's like saying buses work much better than people.
rpm (the file format) is comparable with.deb, rpm (the command) is comparable with dpkg, apt would be comparable with yum or up2date or something. rpm is a package format and its tool, apt is a highlevel package management system (which, iirc, can also handle rpms...).
"A year or so ago, RH promised to fix rpm to make it as useful as apt."
Eh, IIRC, they promised to fix rpm. Which had some flaws (of mostly estoteric nature, which usually werent the actual problem users ran into).
The main issue has been getting redhat and fedora tracked into yum, yum improved and the gui tools polished. Personally I think they're on the right track and getting much closer; yum is getting pleasant to use (and dependency handling is getting exemplary if you install and activate yum-priorities and set your repo priorities (I'd really suggest they install and use it by default, it would prevent users shooting themselves in the foot unless they force the issue and increase the prio of a third party repo))
There are still speed issues (altho they've vastly improved recently), but as far as I can tell they're mostly due to erring on the side of caution ensuring that repo updates wont have broken the local picture of the current situation. I can appreciate that.
'Seems to me that if the universe is a simulation, then the obvious ending condition would be "when the residents figure out they're in a simulation".'
In Iain M. Banks The Algebraist some factions of the main accepted religion came to the same conclusion. The question then came to what percentage of the residents would have to figure it out? Was it enough that there was one single doubter to prevent the simulation from ending?
As you can see, that argument is a very fertile ground for engaging in excessive religious zealotry.
"Those selling the pack of lies should be prosecuted and punished."
If you want to punish irresponsible lending, first, simply repeal the changes (or some of them) made to bankruptcy code in 2005 (on behest of bank lobbyists). Then consider making it even easier to file for bankruptcy and clear credit records faster.
If lenders feel an unreasonable amount of creditors are falling into bankruptcy, then maybe they would be slightly more careful to ensure their loans will actually be paid.
In the end, the bankruptcy code is the final arbiter of who has to take the responsibility for bad loans. Bailing out either side bails them both out and puts the responsibility on everyone but the actual parties, and prosecuting to get one or two scapegoats railroaded is pointless as the blame is systemic and shared around half the market.
"If I remember correctly, the whole point of IP laws is to foster innovation."
Actually, the whole point of IP laws was to secure a monopoly derived revenue stream for the friends of the crown, in exchange for censorship cooperation and other favours. An alternate taxation form, as it were. Fostering innovation and creativity was just the excuse (as writers and innovators had no access to neither printing presses nor market outlets, they simply had no leverage to actually use the monopoly).
If we wanted IP laws that actually fostered innovation and encouraged creativity, we'd actually be paying innovators and creators. It wouldn't be an insurmountable obstacle to revise IP law to allow free duplication and distribution of works, and simply replace 'signing' with a tax on the sales going directly to the creative talent involved. Thus you'd get both free market competition as any label could produce anything (heck, even wal-mart could have print-on-demand kiosks), yet the creators are guaranteed their share, whoever is doing the selling, printing or distribution.
Storage vendors want to sell expensive solutions to gullible execs, pay analysts to produce credible-sounding FUD scenarios.
"monthly e-mail traffic at more than 30 million messages, vs. 17 million just one year ago."
Like, wow. In the meantime 500GB disks cost the same or less than 250GB disks did a year ago.
"The university settled on an IBM storage infrastructure that will afford the institution 350TB of capacity"
350TB? 350 disks? Half that in a year and a quarter in 2? That's not really a huge amount of storage. Anymore. It's an amount of storage I could go order from my friendly online computer store and get delivered tomorrow.
The fact is, corporate storage isnt driving the market anymore, the consumer market is. Most people I know have more storage in their home PC than the average server requires. Companies want to save video? Consumers want their PVR's to save the cable-tv stream.
"I learned that offshore outsourcing isn't to bad after all."
And next year you'll have learned that offshore outsourcing isnt so cheap after all.
Well, maybe not next year, but the writing's on the wall; between the lackluster performance of the dollar and the (almost) pan-asian economic overheating and inflationary meltdown, as well as the young sourcing partners growing up and aquiring their own managerial fat and rigidity, you'll find the balance shifting once again.
Personally I've been overjoyed to have some foreign colleagues; suddenly there are actually people I can send work to when we are far too overloaded to do anywhere near all that needs to be done.
"After this sort of ego bruising they are more ready to accept modern and mature practices."
Yes, well, what goes around comes around. Dont expect temporary phenomena to last forever; you may find yourself in the position to have to kiss and polish those egos once again, so if I were you I'd concentrate a bit more on the positive aspects rather than gloating and fostering discontent.
Eh, bacteriophage tech has been in use for more than 50 years, much in eastern europe and the former Soviet union, and while it's good to see the western medical community start looking around for options after antibiotics runs into a dead end, one rather wonders what took them so long.
The medical field is hardly in good shape to in comparison with even a lackluster technological field, and for the level of funding that the field gets, one could expect it to have produced much more significant strides than it has.
"patents and copyrights are what entice entrepreneurs to make improvements"
So, let me tell you about this opensource thing...
"our protection of intellectual property is one of the elements that has made us the prosperous society that we are"
Our 'protection' of intellectual 'property' has kept us as far less prosperous society than we could have been.
Competition is what drives innovation and the evolution of technology. Handing out intellectual monopolies slows that innovation and evolution. Protecting someone from competition makes them slow and inefficient; to realize exactly how inefficient you just need to look at the former Soviet state-run businesses, or other state-protected monopolies in the west.
Just imagine the world we'd be living in today, had technology been allowed to develop competetively. Imagine the medicines we'd have if 'protected' pharmacorps couldnt spend 80% of their revenue on administration and marketing. Imagine the operating systems we'd have if most of the resources spent on them didnt get tied up in a single company that cant even produce a product better than their last one after six years (nevermind being outevolved by a rag-tag bunch of companies and individuals working in a _competetive segment_ with _unprotected_ software).
Patents and copyrights are a blight upon the economy and upon innovation.
IMO, the more convincing argument would be that the spread of such images itself perpetrates harm upon the victims. I cant even imagine how much more difficult it would make dealing with such psychological trauma.
Of course, the rational arguments are usually rapidly thrown out the window as they then continue to ban everything from artist depictions to CGI.
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Well, at least the US has the worlds most expensive research. Which may, perhaps, be due to the costs of having such a high number of patents.
Nothing drives costs like lawyers.
Couldn't you simply have control over the power?
If I remember correctly, that's already done in USB; you dont have a guarantee of more than 100mA, but you can request it to step up to 500mA (so you can run a 4 port hub off one USB contact without extra power).
Even so, devices like disks could theoretically store power in a battery or capacitors to satisfy their short-term spikes, but as we dont see that happening I suspect it's an actual power constraint, rather than a design mistake.
12W@12V would be 1 Amp, so you'd only need a marginally thicker cable(or two)
Multiply it by 4 for sata and 4-8 for USB, and you would, however, have a noticably thicker motherboard (and/or separate PSU connectors and caps beside the USB and SATA connectors).
It's most likely not the cable that's the problem but the actual electronics that have to support the rated draw of the cable. Or worse, imagine having motherboards that dont support the rated draw and having users calling tech support with 'my computer crashed as I inserted my USB cupwarmer and the keyboard with LCD display and cooling fan at once!!!'.
You'd end up having to have a calculator to figure out what devices you could actually attach to your computer at any one time. Much as I'm loath to say it, I prefer the wallwarts over that.
I can easily think of actual technical issues on this one.
See, historically, disks have had their power supported by the PSU directly. Now you want to replace IDE and put SATA connectors on the motherboard. That's fine. Then you want the SATA connectors to supply power enough to drive one disk? Ok... Then you want the SATA connectors to supply enough power to drive four disks? That's an 80W or more power bus over the motherboard; motherboard manufacturers had just about gotten over having to add new power connectors for CPU's and partly for PCIe, and now you want them to take the hit for disk power too, and presumably do some engineering for it too, (such as stabilizing the power so your computer doesn't crash as parts of the MB loses power when the disk spins up)?
Call it political or call it technical, but in this case it was probably not just simply adding the connectors that was the problem (you could have gotten around the issue by placing a PSU connector next to any SATA contact, of course, but imagine the bitching about that).
Maybe they only spot those sorts of things with the "Evil bit" set??
Close enough. Reading an article by a security guy a few years ago they're only tested on specific known test items, and are thus heavily trained (by their cheap contractor/employer) to spot only those specific items.
So it's not the Evil bit, it's the TSA spot-check test bit. They dont get fired for not spotting something that could be a weapon, they get fired (and their employer fined) for not spotting the TSA test-weapon.
"But you'll continue buying it, because the awesome download speed will trump all other concerns..."
Heh, really tho. I dont think I've _ever_ bought an internet connection for speed. Every single time has been for price (and/or not-screwing-with-my-connection-policies). In the last five years I havent initiated a single change, yet I've had my speed upgraded three times.
With cable companies and DSL providers upgrading consumers just because they can it's no wonder they're whining about having to pay for network upgrades.
How about, you know, not upgrading customers and assigning them the actual bandwidth they have, rather than upgrading the hardware then cutting it down to modem speeds.
currently a niche market at best.
Yep, I'm just having trouble imagining exactly what that niche market is; for that price you can obtain vastly superior performance simply by dumping the money into RAM and disk spindles instead.
You'd have to have some very artificial constraints and a very odd load to actually find a situation where the money would be well spent (as in large mis-programmed database running on a 32bit-only machine that cant have more than 1 sata controller).
pumping water, flywheels, and methods like that work quite well.
Oh, I agree that pumped water storage and such are superior but that's on a grid-level. It doesn't solve the portability or (to some extent) transmission/offline use issues. You're not going to have them in a car or in a cabin in the mountains, or running hospital backup generators. (And on the grid-level I expect the lazy/desperate alternative will resolve that question: nuke plants.)
But while hydrocarbons stink as an energy storage medium, that's mostly a comment on the sad state of the alternative replacements as few of them are near a cost-effective/useful state yet (to the sad extent that geeks get all wild and drooling when hearing about the possibility of hydrocarbon powered fuel-cell laptops...).
"Wouldn't it make more sense to make electricity directly from the solar energy and not involve the coal at all?"
To some extent, yes. The main problem is that electricity produced needs to be (almost) instantly consumed. Chemical storage of the energy avoids that problem. As such, there are various forms of chemical energy storage, ranging from batteries, through hydrogen, through ammonia to hydrocarbons, all with their own problems and advantages.
With batteries, the main trouble is they store too little and they (comparatively) rapidly break down.
Fuel cells can run on hydrogen or ammonia, with varying success. Hydrogen is a PITA to store, but perhaps ammonia is a simpler compromise.
Or hydrocarbons. Which have the advantage of being easy to store and fairly stable.
The thing about the energy crisis is there is no lack of energy (in fact, global warming is in essense an excess of it, and provides excesses of it in the form of weather). There's just a huge problem of extracting, transporting and, above all, storing that energy so you can use it when and where you need it.
"Give them to the second poorest."
Yep, that's the ones the OLPC project is aimed at. IIRC, part of the idea was to replace cost of educational material, so paying for the OLPC would basically be cheaper than buying books for the students (over a period of several years).
"Um... that sounds a bit spun doesn't it?"
Maybe in favour of Intel? A more accurate headline, but one that could be construed as inflammatory would be:
Intel attempts to subvert efforts to get computers to children.
"the Intel machines it's trying to sell will still go to the same target audience as the OLPC units"
For about twice the price. Which means half the number of units.
"it's not like they suddenly hate kids!"
Well, no. They just dont like kids quite as much as they like money.
I don't particularly dislike Intel, but in this case I must say I find their behaviour offensive. This will go on their permanent record and get weighed in for future purchases.
"I'd love to see other devices like the EEE PC tailored towards developing nations in the near future."
In the long run, paving the ground for this device class is without a doubt the greatest contribution of the OLPC project.
"Seriously, that test, if it ever existed, is utter crap."
I linked it in another reply, but it's in swedish, so.
"one may not notice the difference easily if you don't have a side-by-side comparison."
See, that's the point. When you're actually watching a movie you most likely wont have a side-by-side comparison (and they didn't in the test in question), nor will you be concentrating on stubble.
If most people _think_ it's HD even when it's not, when presented out of the blue with a SD stream on a good enough display, should we waste OTA carrier space for HD broadcasts, crowding out alternatives like more channels or data traffic? Should one pay more for DRM crippled blue-ray?
"If you really don't see the difference, then I suggest you get your vision fixed."
Oh, I see the difference, under the right circumstances. I've tested myself back and forth on computer monitors with test patterns and with test files. Mainly while I was trying to determine at what resolution and bitrate to rip my own DVD's (and the resolution/bitrate/storage volume compromise ended up even below SD resolution, as blockiness was noticable and disturbing while resolution didnt affect the experience much and a full quality rip made so little difference itsimply wasnt worth the extra space).
The interesting question isnt wether it's possible to notice the difference, the interesting question is wether you will.
Unfortunately it's in swedish, but here's one http://www.m3.idg.se/2.1022/1.132631 (there's a link to a video and some stuff too). The test was initially mainly intended to assess plasma versus lcd, but that ended up not being nearly as interesting as the failure to reliably distinguish resolutions.
"I manage to pick 1080p/720p over 480p"
If you switch back and forth a few times it's certainly possible, but many need to use visual cues (like you mention, stubble) to do it. I assume you're not normally specifically watching stubble movies, or switching back and forth. What was noticable here was the initial reaction; going from nothing to movie, nobody thought it was SD. And that's pretty close to how you usually operate a TV.
"but 50" / 2m?"
Yes, some had difficulty. Not all eyes are created equal, even assuming they had whatever corrective lenses they'd require.
I'm not saying HD is useless. I'm saying dont pay too much extra, and prioritize other features like color and contrast (or the ability to rip and store content), because under normal viewing circumstances, watching a movie, most people wont actually notice, and some cant even notice the difference.
But that's for film. For still pictures HD resolution is a step forward. For anyone using their TV as a screen it's also a huge step forward. For anyone like me, wanting large computer screens, it's great that they're getting popular.
Still, I hate people getting jerked around by salesmen (and even more by media companies wanting to charge more and jam DRM down their throats in exchange for a difference in quality they cant even see), so I feel compelled to point this out.
And even more telling than what I've been able to find to support that point of view (this latest blindtest, some more I cant recall where they were, some articles on the capacity of the human eye) is the huge amount of material I'm not finding to disprove it.
"Most people that have a good HDTV can tell a large difference in good HD content."
You mean, some people _think_ they can tell the difference (notably TV salesmen and people who've bought a HDTV).
I read a recent blindtest where three experts and a bunch of non-experts were tested for the difference between HD and non HD material on several LCD's and plasma displays.
On the first test, 42 inch screen, 3.5 meters away (10 ft), they all guessed 720p. It was 480p. After much flipping back and forth, some managed to get it right. More tests and eventually getting down to 50" 2 meters (6 ft) away, and there were still some who couldnt even tell 480p from 1080p. Nobody could tell 720p from 1080p better than random chance.
The fact is, such tests show that under normal viewing conditions most people simply dont have eyes and visual centers good enough to reliably notice the difference between SD and HD, nevermind deciding what looks best. You have to get up to 60-100 inch screens at a normal viewing distance to be able to reliably tell the difference; most people would be much better off getting a TV with better color and contrast ratio and simply slap a HD sticker on it so they think it's buzzword compliant.
"popular distros are Debian based"
.deb, rpm (the command) is comparable with dpkg, apt would be comparable with yum or up2date or something. rpm is a package format and its tool, apt is a highlevel package management system (which, iirc, can also handle rpms...).
That's a rather debatable statement.
"Apt just plain works better than rpm"
To make a car analogy, that's like saying buses work much better than people.
rpm (the file format) is comparable with
"A year or so ago, RH promised to fix rpm to make it as useful as apt."
Eh, IIRC, they promised to fix rpm. Which had some flaws (of mostly estoteric nature, which usually werent the actual problem users ran into).
The main issue has been getting redhat and fedora tracked into yum, yum improved and the gui tools polished. Personally I think they're on the right track and getting much closer; yum is getting pleasant to use (and dependency handling is getting exemplary if you install and activate yum-priorities and set your repo priorities (I'd really suggest they install and use it by default, it would prevent users shooting themselves in the foot unless they force the issue and increase the prio of a third party repo))
There are still speed issues (altho they've vastly improved recently), but as far as I can tell they're mostly due to erring on the side of caution ensuring that repo updates wont have broken the local picture of the current situation. I can appreciate that.
Wow, that would be MS outdoing themselves. Do you have any source for the license issue?
I'd figured it was only iRiver misjudging the market, talking to MS, and getting repeatedly screwed with a jackhammer as PFS was dumped.
One would wonder why the some in the industry keep repeating that mistake. Any deal with Microsoft has only one winner.
'Seems to me that if the universe is a simulation, then the obvious ending condition would be "when the residents figure out they're in a simulation".'
In Iain M. Banks The Algebraist some factions of the main accepted religion came to the same conclusion. The question then came to what percentage of the residents would have to figure it out? Was it enough that there was one single doubter to prevent the simulation from ending?
As you can see, that argument is a very fertile ground for engaging in excessive religious zealotry.
"you'd better not have any kind of an accident."
Ah, dont worry, muscle relaxants will still work. Rather like lethal injection, except you get to live to tell the story.
"Those selling the pack of lies should be prosecuted and punished."
If you want to punish irresponsible lending, first, simply repeal the changes (or some of them) made to bankruptcy code in 2005 (on behest of bank lobbyists). Then consider making it even easier to file for bankruptcy and clear credit records faster.
If lenders feel an unreasonable amount of creditors are falling into bankruptcy, then maybe they would be slightly more careful to ensure their loans will actually be paid.
In the end, the bankruptcy code is the final arbiter of who has to take the responsibility for bad loans. Bailing out either side bails them both out and puts the responsibility on everyone but the actual parties, and prosecuting to get one or two scapegoats railroaded is pointless as the blame is systemic and shared around half the market.
"If I remember correctly, the whole point of IP laws is to foster innovation."
Actually, the whole point of IP laws was to secure a monopoly derived revenue stream for the friends of the crown, in exchange for censorship cooperation and other favours. An alternate taxation form, as it were. Fostering innovation and creativity was just the excuse (as writers and innovators had no access to neither printing presses nor market outlets, they simply had no leverage to actually use the monopoly).
If we wanted IP laws that actually fostered innovation and encouraged creativity, we'd actually be paying innovators and creators. It wouldn't be an insurmountable obstacle to revise IP law to allow free duplication and distribution of works, and simply replace 'signing' with a tax on the sales going directly to the creative talent involved. Thus you'd get both free market competition as any label could produce anything (heck, even wal-mart could have print-on-demand kiosks), yet the creators are guaranteed their share, whoever is doing the selling, printing or distribution.
Better article summary:
Storage vendors want to sell expensive solutions to gullible execs, pay analysts to produce credible-sounding FUD scenarios.
"monthly e-mail traffic at more than 30 million messages, vs. 17 million just one year ago."
Like, wow. In the meantime 500GB disks cost the same or less than 250GB disks did a year ago.
"The university settled on an IBM storage infrastructure that will afford the institution 350TB of capacity"
350TB? 350 disks? Half that in a year and a quarter in 2? That's not really a huge amount of storage. Anymore. It's an amount of storage I could go order from my friendly online computer store and get delivered tomorrow.
The fact is, corporate storage isnt driving the market anymore, the consumer market is. Most people I know have more storage in their home PC than the average server requires. Companies want to save video? Consumers want their PVR's to save the cable-tv stream.
"I learned that offshore outsourcing isn't to bad after all."
And next year you'll have learned that offshore outsourcing isnt so cheap after all.
Well, maybe not next year, but the writing's on the wall; between the lackluster performance of the dollar and the (almost) pan-asian economic overheating and inflationary meltdown, as well as the young sourcing partners growing up and aquiring their own managerial fat and rigidity, you'll find the balance shifting once again.
Personally I've been overjoyed to have some foreign colleagues; suddenly there are actually people I can send work to when we are far too overloaded to do anywhere near all that needs to be done.
"After this sort of ego bruising they are more ready to accept modern and mature practices."
Yes, well, what goes around comes around. Dont expect temporary phenomena to last forever; you may find yourself in the position to have to kiss and polish those egos once again, so if I were you I'd concentrate a bit more on the positive aspects rather than gloating and fostering discontent.
"bacteriophage treatments"
Eh, bacteriophage tech has been in use for more than 50 years, much in eastern europe and the former Soviet union, and while it's good to see the western medical community start looking around for options after antibiotics runs into a dead end, one rather wonders what took them so long.
The medical field is hardly in good shape to in comparison with even a lackluster technological field, and for the level of funding that the field gets, one could expect it to have produced much more significant strides than it has.
"patents and copyrights are what entice entrepreneurs to make improvements"
So, let me tell you about this opensource thing...
"our protection of intellectual property is one of the elements that has made us the prosperous society that we are"
Our 'protection' of intellectual 'property' has kept us as far less prosperous society than we could have been.
Competition is what drives innovation and the evolution of technology. Handing out intellectual monopolies slows that innovation and evolution. Protecting someone from competition makes them slow and inefficient; to realize exactly how inefficient you just need to look at the former Soviet state-run businesses, or other state-protected monopolies in the west.
Just imagine the world we'd be living in today, had technology been allowed to develop competetively. Imagine the medicines we'd have if 'protected' pharmacorps couldnt spend 80% of their revenue on administration and marketing. Imagine the operating systems we'd have if most of the resources spent on them didnt get tied up in a single company that cant even produce a product better than their last one after six years (nevermind being outevolved by a rag-tag bunch of companies and individuals working in a _competetive segment_ with _unprotected_ software).
Patents and copyrights are a blight upon the economy and upon innovation.
"This hurts other people."
IMO, the more convincing argument would be that the spread of such images itself perpetrates harm upon the victims. I cant even imagine how much more difficult it would make dealing with such psychological trauma.
Of course, the rational arguments are usually rapidly thrown out the window as they then continue to ban everything from artist depictions to CGI.